photography

Encroachments

The sky glows–
unsightly, yellow–
in a state
of shocked un
earthly apocalyptic
claustrophobia.

The buildings
in the distance have
disappeared–
out of reach,
beyond clarity, spelled out
side all connection.

Even crows
have taken their leave–
no birds sing
or chatter
in the impending collapse
of lungs, of breathing.

The stillness
is disquieting,
aberrant.
It stops time.
Can life be salvaged if we
deny its cleaving?

Our desires–
vast, artificial–
sell us out.
We were warned–
The End Is Near.  To enter,
just continue on.

We are feeling the ill effects of wildfires in Canada. By day, the sky is a sickly yellow, by night it glows a strange orange. It smells like there’s been a fire burning in the neighborhood for days, even with the windows closed.

This is, unfortunately, not an aberration. It will only get worse and more frequent. Unless the world acts to save itself.

Sunrise with the moon outside my front window just a few days ago.

Colleen asked us for Tanka Tuesday to pick a color from a chart she provided, and use one of the descriptive terms below it. I chose yellow and clarity.

And Oracle 2, the random word generator, helped me out with words.

conclusions

vagabonding, I spin–
adrift on the edges of time,
casting reflections
like an afterthought—

adrift on the edges of a time
that whispers of ladders to the moon,
my chimerical bubbles burst,

casting reflections
steadily westward until
they become an abstraction,

like an afterthought–
carelessly lingering in the dreamless
realm of the rising sun

I’m sure you could calculate it mathematically, but the seemingly random appearances of the moon outside my window is a mystery to me. These were taken at dawn this month from my bedroom window, which faces south–but sometimes it sets outside my kitchen window to the west, and I see it while making coffee. Sometimes I only see it early in the night or in the middle of the night when it wakes me shining through the window. Sometimes it grazes the buildings, sometimes it’s so high in the sky I have to get right against the widow and look up in order to see it.

I like the way that last photo becomes an abstract composition of geometric forms.

Colleen asked us to to write about the view outside our window for Tanka Tuesday. I’ve written in the trimeric form. I’ve also used words from the Random Word Generator.

And here’s a recent sunset from the bedroom as well.

I’m lucky to have lots of sky.

Mezza Luna

I pause on the edge of dark, on the edge of light, my direction halted by uncertainty.  Between is a narrow ledge, a threshold balanced on an abyss.  Am I coming or going?  The end is also the beginning and all my questions are merely maps without roads.

I have become abstracted by an imagined journey in which seeking transforms into finding.  In which the visions that ripple my consciousness turn out to be real.  But what if matter is as transient as thought?

half-awake, spirit
splits, expands—crescent-mirrored
into cosmic tides

Frank at dVerse asks us to write a haibun referring to the Mezza Luna, the half or crescent moon. When I was looking for art for the post, I came across the collage at the top, which I used for another of Frank’s moon prompts a year ago.

I am always photographing the moon, so I had plenty of photos to choose from as well. The mirror effect in the first photo is caused by the window through which I shot the photo.

Miss Wilms

There were three Wilms sisters.
Long after that generation was gone,
I discovered they had a brother
who served with my grandfather in WWI.

They never told my grandmother she had cancer.
She was in the hospital for months,
but the grandchildren were not allowed to visit,
because we might tell.

I was only eight years old
when my grandmother died.
I remember most of all
the delicious smells of her kitchen.

My mother adored her mother-in-law.  She told us
how much my grandmother loved us, the children
of her son, her only child.  My grandmother’s sister,
unmarried, childless, became her surrogate.

When we lived in Baltimore, Aunt Lil
came to dinner almost every Sunday.
She taught us to play poker,
and called my father “Chickie”.

I cried on the the train from New York on the way
 to my great-aunt’s funeral.  I was allowed to take
a jade vase from her apartment.  I still have it,
along with the ashtray we gave her that says “Miss Wilms”.

For the dVerse prompt from Sarah where she asks us to write about grandmothers.

Aunt Lil made this vase, trying to capture the color in a Van Gogh painting that she loved. The painting on the shelf behind it is one of Nina’s.

night, owl, moon

observe the owl,
illuminated with shivering shadows
cast between branches
by the moon—

is it a sign,
an initiation?
or simply a reflection
of the enormous mystery
of a journey
whose path can never be
foretold?

When I saw Jane’s Random Word Generator list this week, the first word that jumped out at me was owl, which of course reminded me of my moon and owl painting that seems to go so well with so many poems. I was thinking about it when David published the W3 prompt for this week, which invited us to respond to Denise DeVries’ poem “Generation Gap” using a computer aid, such as a Random Word Generator.

In Denise’s poem, she and her granddaughter look up in wonder at the night sky.

The words I used from Jane’s list were: observe, owl, illume (illuminated), shivering, cast, sign, initiate (initiation), reflect (reflection), enormous, foretell (foretold).

Denise wonders if using a Random Word Generator would be cheating. But words are just words, no matter the source–why would it be cheating to take any word from anywhere as inspiration for a poem? It’s the poet who must make them sing.

Remembering 2022

This house has
time–
it wanted mountains,
morning songs, shadows,
happy screams.

We are all sailing
another grey sky,
clinging to tattered
margins.  Move, expand–
you can hear the universe–

Sing.  Ask the wind
if the moon cried
when the universe was young.

Laura at dVerse asked us to take the first lines of the first poems we published each month in 2022 and make a new poem. Three of mine were haibuns, so I used the first line of the haiku part. I’ve also included art from some of those posts. If it sounds Oracle-like, several of the poems were from that source. She always bleeds into the rest of my writing as well.

Asylum
gifts
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Living  
Conjunction
Beach Haiku 2022
this long night
Darkness Darkness
The Gravity of Home
Year of the Tiger
multitudes of changing colour, condensed motion, thoughts full
to sail or to swim
be the asking

the turning of the year

I visited the Oracle the last two Saturdays as well, but just printed them out and put them aside. After I printed out today’s message I looked at the other two, and was surprised (although I shouldn’t have been) that they overlapped and repeated themselves.

Because of the word “fiddle”, which always reminds me of Chagall, I looked for the collage I had done long ago for one of Jane’s prompts with a Chagall painting. Although it doesn’t have a fiddle, it has the moon, and fits well with the day, New Year’s Eve.

Here’s the moon yesterday, afternoon over Central Park, and at night out my window.

It’s always a good time make some art with the birdlings.

12/17 the secret between if and why 

behold deeply
listen

the spirit of the wind
follows
a riverpath of everafter

be
who you are inside
always

the ancient wild world
covered
with birdsong and treelight

12/24 windswept

amid oceans
of life born from this
universe–
sailing skies
of color–remembering
how always just is

12/31 the turning of the year

beneath dream fiddles whisper
the cries of shadows–
a blue language of faraway
moonships, swimming through watermusic
that we can almost recall

sing with the wind
and be who you are

beneath shadows time plays with meaning

I got a message from the Oracle earlier this week when I opened my kitchen blind thinking “strange light this morning”.

The first thing she gave me today was the title, and the rest of the words fell quickly right into place.

The rainbow lasted about 10 minutes. Our local online newsletter was filled with photos that day.

Central Park Walk November 2022

1
It’s crisp but not yet glove weather.
Elongated shadows fall from the autumn sun.
Above the sky is so blue it looks unreal.

2
People are seated along the path, faces turned up toward the sun.
Construction workers eat their lunches together in Spanish.
Empty benches line the shaded side of the street.

3
Girls in short plaid school uniforms drift in bunches.
A couple walks slowly, holding hands.
A nanny sings softly to the child in her carriage.

4
Dogs wait patiently as their owners chat.
Squirrels chase each other, rustling leaves and bouncing branches.
Birds call in many languages; I only see sparrows and starlings.

5
The remains of the Marathon are piled up along Fifth Avenue.
Vestiges of Halloween decorations still linger on buildings.
Pine cones and needles mingle with oak leaves on the ground.

Brendan at earthweal discussed this week the intimacy of our landscapes. He suggested “a walk on the wild side”. This is not exactly a wild walk, but it’s my landscape, where I often go both to get from Point A to Point B here in the city, and to get outside of myself.

Also linking to dVerse OLN, hosted by Sanaa.